Various types of data stores can be used, including content-addressable data stores, chunk-based data stores, and distributed file systems. A content-addressable data store is a data store in which retrieval of a data item is based on the content of the data item. A chunk-based data store refers to a data store in which pieces of files, rather than entire files, are stored in the data store.
A challenge faced by the various data store architectures is the ability to efficiently handle large amounts of data, such as for data stored in backup or archiving storage systems, storage systems to store data of a large enterprise, and so forth. An issue associated with certain data-store architectures is that they do not scale very well as the amount of data that has to be stored increases. The inability to scale effectively can lead to reduced data storage system performance or limits on the amount of data that can be stored in the storage system.